Ixxviii 
Sir William Jackson Hooker . 
larger Museum now to be described was opened, this one was 
numbered II in the Guide-book. Before proceeding to de- 
scribe the second and third Museums erected by my father, 
it is gratifying to relate that within six years of the first being 
opened eight others, professedly on the lines of that at Kew, 
were established ; they were in Edinburgh, in the India House 
(London), in Guiana, Jamaica, Melbourne, Calcutta, Madras, 
and in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. 
In the summer of 1855 the Director was invited by the 
Imperial Commissioners of the French International Exhibition 
of that year to take part in its functions, which resulted in his 
obtaining almost the entire collection of vegetable products 
there brought together. In aid of this he procured a grant of 
^400 from the Treasury, which the President of the Board 
of Trade, unasked, supplemented with a like sum. Thus 
provided, and with the ready assistance of the officers of 
the Board of Trade, and of the Science and Art Department, 
and enriched by donations of many exhibitors, he secured 
and transmitted to Kew forty-eight large cases of museum 
articles. This accumulation, and the facts that the Museum 
of 1848 was already overcrowded, and that great stores of 
specimens were being huddled away in the temples and sheds 
of the Gardens, led to the erection of a second and much 
larger building. This, which is Museum No. I of the Guide- 
books, was sanctioned by Parliament in 1854, was completed, 
fitted with 13,000 square feet of glazed cases, filled, and 
opened to the public in 1857. It is that now standing oppo- 
site the Palm House with the piece of water intervening. The 
expedience of following a classification of the contents of 
both Museums according to the Natural System necessitated 
the breaking up of the contents of the first, in which were re- 
tained all products of the Monocotyledonous and Cryptogamic 
divisions of the vegetable kingdom ; the Dicotyledonous being 
transferred to the new building. In this laborious task the 
Director had the gratuitous aid of the Rev. Professor Henslow 
of Cambridge (Rector of Hitcham in Suffolk), who to his 
knowledge of botany and vegetable products, added singular 
